Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
Tinder Press
ISBN: 9781472223821
- Mphuthumi Ntabeni writes regular book columns for LitNet.
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There are seasons in which grief is not a mere abstraction, but a habitation. In such seasons, one reads and watches everything differently – as I recently reread Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet and watched the movie of the same title, with different eyes. It became a revelation of what happens when private loss hardens into art.
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There are seasons in which grief is not a mere abstraction, but a habitation. In such seasons, one reads and watches everything differently – as I recently reread Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet and watched the movie of the same title, with different eyes. It became a revelation of what happens when private loss hardens into art.
The person who made me understand the story better is the director of the screen adaptation of the book, Chloé Zhao. In her acceptance speech for winning Best Drama at the Golden Globe, she said, “The most important thing in being an artist is learning to be vulnerable enough to allow ourselves to be seen.” It dawned on me that this was what I had been doing with my latest novel, Multitudes. All of a sudden, the tidal movements of grief and mourning within the book and film became as familiar to me as the air I breathe.
There are adaptations that translate, and there are adaptations that interpret. The film Hamnet, directed by Zhao and co-written with Maggie O’Farrell, belongs decisively to the latter category. It transposes O’Farrell’s celebrated 2020 novel to the screen with reimagined interior lyricism and embodiment of grief. It is a striking production with visual emotionality and authority that, in certain respects, surpasses the novel’s more elusive metaphysical power.
The governing thesis of both book and film is deceptively simple: how the death of a child reverberates beyond the domestic sphere into the architecture of art narrative. O’Farrell’s novel speculates, with disciplined restraint, that the loss of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, shaped the emotional core of Shakespeare’s most popular play, Hamlet. Zhao’s film makes that speculative connection more explicit, edging closer to causation than suggestion. The difference between the two mediums lies precisely in the novel’s cultivated ambiguity and the film’s appetite for metaphysical embodiment of the spiritual aura derived from the loss.
O’Farrell’s achievement in the book rests largely in her command of interiority, especially rendering Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, a mystic in the reimagined nature of the Greek classical culture of Orpheus and Eurydice. Her Agnes is not the rural ignoramus of the traditional patriarchy narrative, whose naïveté causes Shakespeare to flee to London. She is a fiercely intuitive mother, a controlling wife and the novel’s gravitational centre. O’Farrell immerses the reader in her sensory, forest fairy world: the weight of herbs in her palm, the tremor of intuition before illness strikes, the fragile ecstasies of early motherhood. The prose moves through shifting timelines with fluid assurance, refusing linear consolation. Grief, in the novel, is a climate; in the film, it is a tragic foreboding hanging over everything joyful or sad, like the sword of Damocles.
Anyone who has fallen under the engulfing fog of grief knows by experience that it does not simply follow you; sometimes it precedes your actions, saturates rooms and alters the weather under which you exist. The difference between climate and foreboding is not trivial here; it marks the metaphysics of mourning, which both the book and the film delineate so well. It keeps the link between personal loss and artistic creation – between Hamnet and Hamlet – as suggestive rather than declarative. William Shakespeare is kept at a deliberate remove, his interior life only partially accessible and in resistance of his known biographical facts, while the story instead privileges the mystery at the heart of artistic transfiguration. It is clear that both creators – O’Farrell and Zhao – understand that grief resists explanatory neatness.
Zhao’s film confronts the inherent challenge of adaptation: how to render interiority without dissolving into exposition. Her solution is sensory immersion. Long takes, natural light, the tactile textures of Tudor domesticity – these become substitutes for prose. The camera lingers where the novel meditates. Silence replaces syntax.
Jessie Buckley’s performance of Agnes has remarkable emotional intelligence. She renders grief as a physiological transformation through body movement and facial expression, altering of breath, a hallowing posture, and the stripping of her voice of ornament, noise and spectacle. Her anguish is neither theatrical nor sentimental, but granular, lived with unflinching honesty. Watching her, one recognises that grief is not an idea, but a survival metabolism of necessity.
Opposite her, Paul Mescal portrays Shakespeare with deliberate reserve. His grief surfaces obliquely, mediated through distance and work. Where Buckley’s performance combusts inwardly, Mescal’s cools into restraint. The tension between them, between immediate mourning and deferred articulation, drives the second half of the film without it collapsing into tedious mawkishness. It recalls the asymmetry of mourning familiar to anyone who has loved, as one body burns for the one that calcifies.
It is in the second half, that the film diverges most decisively from its original source. Zhao makes visible what O’Farrell left hovering. The gestation of Hamlet becomes more clearly dramatised; rehearsals and theatrical imagery draw the line between father and playwright. The tragedy of Hamlet is invoked less as an echo than as a consequence, allowing the play to move from shadow to presence. Hamlet ceases to be a distant monument and becomes a precise wound worked into language.
But the actor who brings the film’s most piercing pathos, especially in the scenes preceding his death and in the haunting post-death theatrical coda, which imagines his purgatorial departure, is Jacobi Jupe, who plays Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son. If Buckley carries the weight of maternal devastation, it is Jupe who first establishes what is at stake. Hamnet is not simply the catalyst for art; he is its irreducible human being, a child invested with his parents’ wishes and dreams. Through him, the audience understands that what will later become Hamlet was once a breathing, laughing, original child. That translation – from son to symbol, from body to language – is the film’s most devastating movement, and Jupe’s delicate, disciplined performance ensures that this never feels abstract.
Jupe’s performance is precocious, but what makes it remarkable is how he renders the role of a boy poised on the threshold between play and premonition, curiosity and vulnerability. His stillness in moments of confusion, the slight hesitation before speech, the unguarded trust in his gaze. These create an emotional register that makes the later loss unbearable, because it feels so ordinary, so untheatrical. Anyone familiar with grief will know how irritatingly mundane death can be – rightfully so, for it is a devastating part of life – second only to birth in its necessary ordinariness.
In the sequences before his death, Jupe allows us to see a child who is not merely symbolic, but fully embodied, alive to the textures of the world – alert to his sister, tethered to his mother, and anxiously, lovingly longing for his father, especially when he is about to leave. The performance refuses the easy shorthand of angelic innocence. There is the mischief and impatience, as well as the thoughtfulness and innocent selfishness and sacrifice, of children. That complexity deepens the tragedy. When the film shifts into the theatre space, where grief and imagination converge, Jupe’s presence acquires an almost metaphysical stillness. His “departure” is staged as the release of a grief burden for both himself and the parents, a Calvary declaration sigh: “It is accomplished.” The quiet dignity with which he inhabits those final moments lends the film a spiritual gravity that no amount of visual lyricism could manufacture on its own.
Of course, no adaptation escapes compression. The novel’s patient excavation of the strong bond between Hamnet and Judith, its layered treatment of contagion and communal fear, its intricate rendering of Stratford and London – these are necessarily streamlined. But the film privileges emotional trajectory over narrative complexity. Where the novel’s grief depicts a many-sided prism – maternal, paternal, sibling, communal – the film narrows its focus to the marital axis. The result is a cleaner arc and also a reduction of the novel’s polyphonic resonance. But the beauty is in how the novel’s ambiguity gives way to thematic clarity in the movie.
What we are being reminded of is that cinema is an art of surfaces that imply depth, whereas prose is an art of depth that constructs its own surfaces. Zhao understands this. Her Hamnet does not attempt to replicate O’Farrell’s lyrical interior monologue. Instead, it offers an embodied theology of loss, grief written on skin, light and landscape. It is a theology of endurance, rather than consolation.
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What we are being reminded of is that cinema is an art of surfaces that imply depth, whereas prose is an art of depth that constructs its own surfaces. Zhao understands this. Her Hamnet does not attempt to replicate O’Farrell’s lyrical interior monologue. Instead, it offers an embodied theology of loss, grief written on skin, light and landscape. It is a theology of endurance, rather than consolation.
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What ultimately binds novel and film is their shared refusal of facile transcendence. Neither offers redemption cheaply. Yes, Hamlet emerges from the ashes of Hamnet, but does so in transmutation rather than a redemptive act bought on the cheap. That is a difficult, and correct, choice – a radical depiction that art does not erase grief; indeed, it may reshape mourning into a new medium of living as means of coping.
In this respect, Zhao’s film achieves something rare. It honours the spirit of O’Farrell’s work, while accepting the distinct grammar of cinema. The novel lingers in the mind as a chamber piece of inward reckoning, while the film remains in the body as sensation. Measured against the book, yes, the film sacrifices ambiguity for immediacy, and polyphony for focus. But in so doing, it gains in presence what it relinquishes in indeterminacy. Its grief is not the same as the book’s, but is a faithful one made flesh, made visible and, in its own register, profoundly moving.
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